Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

by Kathleen Rooney

  Five dollars. This, I remember, was exactly the request that prompted the Subway Vigilante’s act of violence, if the news coverage can be believed. I wonder whether these boys know this—whether they’re referencing it deliberately, or whether it’s just the standard protocol for muggings these days.

  “You boys should be careful in this neighborhood,” I say. “It’s a dangerous area. And you don’t know what people are liable to do.”

  The tall one and the short one exchange incredulous looks. “You’re not understanding what I’m saying,” the tall one says.

  The nervous third steps closer to get a better look at me. He’s dark skinned and slight; his eyes—shrunken by the lenses of black-framed spectacles—are still frantically scanning our surroundings for any hint of danger, like those of a doughboy in no-man’s-land.

  “Yo,” he says. “This is an old lady right here.”

  “I know what it is,” the tall one says. “I got eyes.”

  “We ain’t out here to fuck with old ladies, man,” the nervous one says. “Let’s go.”

  It occurs to me that thanks to my height and my bearing, someone who spots me from a distance in bad light might easily take me as younger and maler than I am, and this seems to be what my three challengers have done. Two seem set on proceeding regardless, but I think I see a hint of anguish in the bespectacled face of the third. A fear of consequences, probably—but it could also be recognition of some kind: an echo of a grandmother or a great aunt. With the vodka encouraging presumptuousness and leaps of logic, I cannot help but feel a sudden rush of affection for this boy, my reluctant champion, my bridge to safety.

  I raise a wobbly finger to point at him. “You,” I say, “look just like that young man in the Oreo cookie commercial.”

  The three of them stare at me.

  “Those glasses,” I explain.

  “Bitch is drunk or crazy,” the short one mutters.

  “We were just talking,” the tall one says, “about the five dollars you gonna give us. Remember that?”

  “Oh yes,” I say. “I wish that I could.”

  “I think you can,” says the tall one.

  “I think you definitely can,” says his short friend.

  He has something metal in his hand—a knife, maybe, though it doesn’t look like a knife. The men the Subway Vigilante shot were supposedly armed with sharpened screwdrivers, tools they planned to use to break into vending machines.

  “Maybe you oughta just give us your wallet,” says the taller one.

  The third is silent, drifting away again.

  For the first time it occurs to me that these young men might kill me. Or they could knock me down, which at my age might amount to the same thing, depending on how I fall.

  If they kill me, they kill me. Gian loses both his mothers in one night.

  If they don’t, they don’t. And I don’t think they will. They seem like troublemakers, but not hard criminals. They’re not violent or strung out. If they wanted to hurt me they’d have done so by now.

  “Are you sure you want my wallet?” I say. “If a police officer stops you, how will you explain where it came from?”

  “Lady, what the fuck do you think this is, Let’s Make a Deal?” says the tall one, but his eyes hesitate in a way that his words do not.

  “Look,” says the short one, “we ain’t discussing this. You can give us the cash, or maybe we just walk off with your bag. Right?”

  “Yo, what the fuck, Keith?” the nervous one says, addressing his tall friend, who blanches to hear his name spoken aloud. “This ain’t what we come out here for, man. This ain’t the guy.”

  Keith flares, forgetting me for an instant. “They’re all the guy,” Keith says. “You been listening to all the same shit as me, man. Every cracker in five boroughs is calling up the mayor, telling him to give the keys to the city to this Charles Bronson subway-shooting motherfucker. We got to take our streets back.”

  “Yeah, but these ain’t our streets, man,” the nervous one says. “We in Midtown now.”

  Keith has already launched into the next component of his diatribe before I begin to grasp what he’s saying. “Wait a minute,” I interrupt. “Wait just a minute. Are you boys out here looking for the Subway Vigilante?”

  He’s back in my face now, leaning in. “What we’re looking for,” he says, “is five dollars. That’s all you need to concern yourself with.”

  I catch my breath, let it out slowly. “For your information,” I say, “not every white person in the city approves of what that man did.” Keith objects, but I raise my voice, cutting him off. “That man wasn’t defending himself,” I say. “He was a racist thug looking for trouble. What he did was disgusting, and I hope he goes to jail for it.”

  This just makes Keith angrier; I need to start backing down. Before he can say anything else, I slide my purse from my shoulder and put it in his hands. “Here,” I say. “Take a look. Go ahead. It won’t help you. After you see there’s nothing of value, I’d appreciate it if you’d give it back.”

  He passes it to his short friend, who begins to rifle through it, dropping items to the pavement as he goes: my little can of Mace, my penlight, my Swiss Army Knife. “Nothing here,” he says, letting the purse fall, showing the wallet to Keith.

  “You’re too late,” I say. “I gave all my cash to a guy at a Filipino bodega in the Village. I spent all I had on some snacks and a pot of dirt.”

  Keith is giving me a withering glare, outraged and unsatisfied. The short one’s movements evince an injured heartlessness, a desire to do harm. Even the prudence of the third is being shoved aside by plain fear. If they kill me, I just hope that someone comes to my apartment and finds Phoebe quickly. Cats can live for a while without food, but I don’t want her to suffer because of my recklessness.

  “Okay,” Keith says, pointing at my mink. “You got no cash, you can give us that coat.”

  “Man, what are we doing all this talking for?” says the shorter one. “Let’s grab the coat and get the fuck out.”

  “I don’t want no part of this, Darrell,” the third one says. He’s even farther away now. More a spectator than a participant. The chorus in a Greek tragedy. I think back to the Christian Women’s Hotel, our bedsheet-costumed performance of Antigone. How little we understood then of the lines we spoke. No man is so foolish that he is enamored of death.

  Tall Keith and short Darrell are squaring off, looking at me, then at each other, then back to me. Darrell tosses my wallet over his shoulder. It hits the ground with a slap. A decision is about to be made.

  “Let’s think for a second,” I say, “about where to go from here. Your friend”—I nod to the distant third, the shortsighted chorister—“wants to let me go. Darrell here wants to pursue the assault-and-battery route and take my coat by force. But these are not our only two options. Let’s keep this conversation going.”

  “We don’t need this hassle,” says the nervous one. “Let’s just go. That coat ain’t even real.”

  “I beg your pardon,” I say. “It most certainly is real. I paid four thousand dollars for it in 1942.”

  “What’s it worth today?” says Keith.

  “I honestly couldn’t tell you,” I say. “I’ve never thought about selling it. Look, I’ll give you the coat. But it’s cold out here, and I’m old, and I still need to walk to R.H. Macy’s tonight before I go home. I can’t do that without a coat.”

  “That ain’t our problem,” says Darrell.

  “I think we ought to swap,” I continue. “You get my mink, and I make it home without freezing to death. That’s the offer on the table.”

  Darrell is still ready to rush me—legs wide, knees bent, shoulders low—but Keith softens, rocks back on his heels. His flood of anger has drained away, showing what’s underneath, which looks like sadness. “Okay,” says Keith. “We’ll swap.”

  “Keith, are you fucking serious?”

  “Shut up, Darrell,” says Keith. “Give her you
r jacket.”

  “What?” says Darrell. “She ain’t getting nothing from me, fool. What you giving away my coat for?”

  “Because it’s the shittiest one we got,” says Keith.

  “Hold your horses,” I say. “No offense to your coat, Darrell—which actually looks both elegant and comfortable—but that deal doesn’t work for me. This is a fur coat. In addition to being very expensive, it’s extremely warm. As you’ve noticed, it’s gotten cold tonight. Based on the fact that Darrell, who is in the prime of his life, is visibly shivering, I must conclude that a track jacket is not warm enough for an elderly person like myself. Plus the arms are too short. I want the flight jacket.”

  “Aw, fuck you, lady,” Keith says.

  I open my arms wide, feeling vulnerable, trying to seem confident. “Come on, Keith,” I say. “This is your lucky day. A full-length mink coat in perfect condition? Free and clear, with no trouble from the law? You can sell it and buy jackets for the whole neighborhood.”

  Keith looks at me, shakes his head. “You’re crazy, lady” he says.

  But he takes off his jacket.

  I do the same with my coat. The cold air rushes in around my armpits; I hadn’t realized how much I’ve been sweating. It feels good for a second. Then my teeth start to chatter.

  Keith puts out a hand to give me his coat, another to take mine. We swap. He drapes my mink over his shoulder, steps away. “Let’s not be too hasty,” I say. “We’d better try them on.”

  “Come on, man,” says Darrell. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “What are you scared of?” I say. “This is an honest swap. Nobody’s in trouble.”

  Just as Keith puts on my mink coat and I put on his jacket, the clock must strike midnight and the ball must drop, because we can hear, all the way over here, all the people in Time Square roaring.

  It’s 1985.

  The coat looks stunning on Keith, like it was tailored for him.

  “You look like a pimp,” says his formerly nervous, now visibly relieved friend.

  “Thanks,” says Keith.

  “And you look hilarious,” his friend says, using his chin to point at me. I am sure that he’s right.

  “Well,” I say, closing the jacket’s most functional zipper, “Happy New Year, gentlemen. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

  “No doubt it has,” Keith says. “You’re gonna run for a cop as soon as you get your ass round that corner, ain’t you?”

  “Why would I? There’s nothing to call a cop about.”

  “Oh, right. This shit here was just a routine midnight street-corner business transaction between a fur-coat-wearing old white lady and three black dudes from the South Bronx. They’re gonna have no problem believing that.”

  “Hmm,” I say. “I see your point. You want a bill of sale?”

  “Yes I do, actually.”

  “Fuck,” says Darrell. “Can we go?”

  I take a moment to search the dark pavement for my notebook and a pen. The third boy finds them before I do, hands them to me, and then gathers the rest of my things as I write up the bill, returning them to my purse, returning my purse to me. The bag doesn’t match my new coat, but that’s all right.

  “You know,” I say, “I have a question for you boys, if you can spare another minute.”

  “Y’all are killing me,” Darrell says, hugging himself, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  “As I’ve been walking around the city,” I say, “I keep hearing this song. A rap, I think it’s called. I’m wondering if you know it. It’s not easy to describe. There’s no chorus, per se. It involves a great deal of hipping and hopping.”

  “Aw, man,” the third boy says. “I bet I know what that is.”

  “That could be anything,” Keith says.

  “At certain points,” I say, “one of the gentlemen, one of the rappers, refers to a Holiday Inn. Does that ring any bells?”

  This doubles all three of them over, even Keith. “This shit ain’t real,” Darrell says. “It ain’t really happening.”

  “Could be anything,” Keith says again.

  “Damn, y’all,” the third boy says. “She’s talking about Sugarhill Gang! ‘Rapper’s Delight’!”

  “I know what the fuck she’s talking about, Winston,” Keith snaps. His mirth is gone. He turns to me, plucks the bill of sale from my fingers. “You heard what the man said. ‘Rapper’s Delight.’ Sugarhill Gang. It’s from, like, six years ago. What you want to know for?”

  “As I said, I keep hearing it. I like it.”

  “Ain’t you got your own music?” Keith says. “Barbra Streisand, or the Carpenters, or some shit like that? How come white folks always feel the need to tell us how good our music is, like we don’t know?”

  “Just curious, Keith.”

  “Yeah?” Keith says. “Go be curious about something else. I bet there’s real good Japanese music and Mexican music that nobody’s listening to. C’mon, y’all. Let’s go.”

  He takes a few long backward steps away from me, then spins—the mink flaring—and marches off. His friends follow a beat behind him. “You crazy, lady,” Darrell shouts as he goes.

  “I’m actually not,” I say. “I have been. But I’m not anymore.”

  Just as the other two catch up with him, Keith stops, turns, walks back to me. He lifts an index finger in front of my nose. I flinch.

  “You gonna go home and brag about this?” he says.

  “I have nothing to brag about,” I say. “And no one to brag to.”

  He gives me a hard, troubled look. “This ain’t no more than what it is,” he says. “Just because you show us some respect don’t mean we got no problem with you. The reason tonight played out like it did is because you had this coat, and because you made a good choice with it. Lots of folks, they wouldn’t have that choice. You think about that before you go feeling too good about how you handled yourself.”

  “I understand.”

  “You don’t understand shit, old lady. Maybe it ain’t all your fault that you don’t. But you don’t.” He looks me up and down, as if taking me in for the first time. “You best get on home,” he says. “Before a real criminal shows up to mess with you.”

  “You best do the same, Keith. Maybe I’ll come up and visit one of these days. The South Bronx, you said?”

  Keith laughs. “Yeah, that’s right,” he says. “South Bronx. Hunts Point, Tiffany and Randall. You curious? You come on up. You’ll learn a lot. You gonna wear my jacket when you come?”

  I shake my head, tap my hand against the zippered leather over my heart. “I’m gonna wear my jacket when I come,” I say.

  The three of them walk quickly to the west without another look back. I continue east, toward Seventh Avenue, then down Thirty-Fourth to R.H. Macy’s.

  The jacket is still warm from having Keith in it, and the smell it exhales is strange, but strangely comforting: coconut oil maybe, and marijuana, and sweat. I forgot to take my gloves out of my coat when I traded it, so I stick my hands into the jacket pockets, and in the right one I feel a scrap of paper: a fortune-cookie fortune that Keith had been saving for me unwittingly.

  You think that it is a secret but it has never been one, it says.

  There are a few more people on the street now that 1985 is underway. Partygoers have begun to trickle from wherever they were to wherever they want to be, seeping like water into the cracks of the city.

  I stand in front of the main entrance of R.H. Macy’s, the one with the clock face and the caryatids staring at the now-closed A.S. Beck shoe store across Thirty-Fourth Street, the carved women acting as pillars for the World’s Largest Store.

  Hats and frocks and shoes and cold creams and perfumes and pots and pans—the parts and parcels of people’s lives. I can’t see all of these items through the plate-glass windows, but I know they’re inside.

  I am suddenly so tired, I think I may already be asleep. The structure of the city is the structure of a d
ream. And me, I have been a long time drifting.

  A white-collar girl who came to New York and hit the top. The first kiss of the city—I remember it, and so many after. But nobody can remember the last kiss, the final handclasp. When one leaves for good, one cannot recall the leaving.

  There have been so many times in my life when I found the actual world to be completely unsuitable. I have done my level best to remedy that, through poetry and through advertising, and I’m glad my efforts were appreciated.

  I am proud that I fought so hard against the world, relieved that I made my fragile truce with it. I can greet it now, from time to time, as it really is.

  And I’m glad that I’ve stopped by R.H. Macy’s, but I know I can’t stay. I look at my reflection in the plate glass: the same check-in I made sixty years ago, on my way to interview for the job that gave shape to my life. The face I have now is hardly the same. Neither is the city.

  As I turn and walk toward Murray Hill and home and purring Phoebe, I suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

  Walking East on Thirty-Sixth Street, my street, I can’t see the moon anywhere, but I know it’s up there.

  Somewhere under it is Gian, are the children. Somewhere under it is Julia—or not. I think back to the handful of greeting cards that she and I exchanged over the years, and her unrealized wish that she and I be friends. I always wondered what else she wanted from me, having already taken Max. I kept my guard up. And she cared for my ailing ex-husband, my only true love; she nurtured my son, and helped nurture his children, even after Max was gone. She gave of herself joyfully, in a way I could never manage, could never conceive. What else could she have wanted except to make amends, to care for us, to help when she was needed? Why did that never occur to me?

  So many careers and fortunes are made by expecting the least and the worst of people. And yet people are rarely so disappointing. The city has taught me that.

  A long black car pulls up next to me, engine sighing, a bass voice booming from the window, “Lillian! Is that you?”